Countee Cullen, one of the most polished lyric poets of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote “On Going” in the 1920s, a period when African American writers were reshaping American literature. Cullen was known for his devotion to traditional forms—the sonnet, the ballad, the quatrain—and for a lyric voice influenced by Keats and Shelley. He was one of the movement’s most celebrated figures, and his work often blended romantic elegance with questions of faith and identity. In “On Going,” he brings that classical restraint to a subject that could easily turn somber: what happens after death.
The speaker treats death not as an ending but as a change of address. A grave, he says, is “all too weak a thing / To hold my fancy long.” What persists is not the body in a coffin but the playful, imaginative energy he calls fancy. He imagines himself returning with the seasons—he will “bear a blossom with the spring” or become “a blackbird’s song.” That quick move from blossom to birdsong sets the poem’s pattern: the self scatters into beauty rather than vanishing. In the second stanza the transformation grows more physical and nourishing. The speaker will “fade with ease, / Melt into earth like snow,” then become “food for hungry, growing trees” and “help the lilies blow.” Death here is generous, a loosening of form that lets other life thrive. The central idea is not the survival of a fixed soul but a gentle recycling of the self into the living world.
Form and image work together to keep that vision soft and songlike. The poem is built of three quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme; lines alternate between four stresses and three stresses, a ballad meter that feels like a quiet hymn or lullaby. The rhymes are clean—“ease” with “trees,” “walk” with “talk”—and the final shorter line of each stanza gives the poem a sense of settling, as if each thought exhales. Cullen’s diction is deliberately light: “fancy,” “fade,” “melt,” “help.” He avoids words like corpse or decay. Instead, the body becomes snow, food, rain. The trees are “hungry,” the lilies “blow”—an older word for bloom that also carries the breath of wind. In the last stanza, the speaker turns to a beloved who might walk “fain” of his nearness, an archaic word meaning eager or desirous. He promises, “I may come back to her, and talk / In liquid words of rain.” That final image fuses voice and water, so that speech itself becomes weather. The word “liquid” does much of that work: it suggests both the sound of rain and the fluency of a voice, so that grief is answered not by silence but by a new kind of eloquence.
Part of the poem’s significance lies in its quiet refusal of melodrama. The Harlem Renaissance is often taught through poems of racial pride, protest, and urban energy; Cullen certainly wrote those too, but “On Going” shows another side of the movement—a Black poet claiming the English lyric tradition as entirely his own and filling it with intimate, universal feeling. The title itself opens two meanings: “on going” as continuing, and “going on” as departing. Death is both a departure and an ongoing presence. In a world where grief can feel like a sealed door, Cullen offers a window left open: the dead may return not as ghost but as blossom, blackbird, tree food, rain. That is the poem’s lasting gift—a gentle, natural resurrection that asks nothing of doctrine and everything of attention.